The following interview was originally published by Integral Leadership Review (Volume X, No. 2, March 2010).
|
How Money Changes the World: An interview with author and integral economist Jordan MacLeod.
|
ILR: Tell us about your process for writing New Currency.
JM: Well, it’s been a work in progress for a few years, but it really wasn’t until the onset of the financial crisis and other geopolitical factors that really provided the context and impetus to finish the book.
ILR: What other geopolitical factors are you speaking of?
JM: Well, the most significant was learning that Iran had mastered the ability to detonate missiles at high altitudes from (commercial) naval vessels. The only plausible purpose for such capability is launching electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks by detonating nuclear warheads at high altitudes overseas.
ILR: How is this connected to economics and money?
JM: Problems like Iran and North Korea are wicked in nature. Tyrants with nuclear weapons—I mean, people with an active disdain for their own people, let alone for Western civilization—it just doesn’t get any tougher than that. I certainly do not envy any world leader charged with protecting his or her own people and then having to face regimes with no interest in integrity or negotiating a reasonable outcome. The alternatives are limited if not bleak in both cases. Read more »
Yesterday, McKinsey & Co published several excellent articles on currency on their What Matters site. Jeffrey Garten’s piece Toward a Post-Dollar World is particularly insightful. Here, Garten argues that the end of the Dollar’s reign is not a question of if but when and calls for a proactive approach by government, the corporate sector and academia to consider alternatives and make purposeful decisions. The big question for all of us, he argues, is the same as the one posed in New Currency: “what kind of monetary system will best serve the world given deep-seated changes in the balance of economic power, and what process can be followed to develop it?”
“There is a huge research agenda for universities and think tanks,” says Garten. “A world in which the dollar has lost a good deal of its strength will have profound impact on geopolitics, the global economy, and global trade and finance. It will mark the end of the American Empire and usher in something as yet undefined. Little thinking has been done on what all this will mean, and how it is best handled. It’s time that changed.” We couldn’t agree more.
When John Maynard Keynes wrote his essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren 79 years ago, he was thinking about us. In it, he boldly predicted that we would learn how to create a world over the next 20 years that “solved the economic problem.” Keynes was a remarkable visionary. One of the qualities that exemplified his brilliance was his capability to adjust his thinking as appropriate to the changing life conditions in front of him.
Thus, he was not only a towering figure in 20th Century economic thought, but also able to sufficiently distance himself from his own policies to foresee a world and economy wholly different from his own:
“I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virture-that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously as well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.”
Robert Skidelsky offers a timely reflection on Keynes’ vision. It’s well worth a read.
Jordan MacLeod
Book Reviews, Economic Transformation, Global Finance, Growth | admin | 
May 4, 2010 1:21 pm | 
Comments (1) 
